Improving speech understanding in bionic hearing prostheses
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Date
2017-03
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Abstract
An estimated 37.5 million Americans suffer from hearing impairment (NIDCD, 2015).
For individuals with severe to profound hearing impairment, a bionic hearing prosthesis called a
cochlear implant (CI) is a standard treatment option. The CI is a medical device that encodes
sound as a series of electrical signals, which are transmitted directly to the auditory nerve via
surgically-implanted electrodes. Despite decades of technological advancements, the most
pervasive barrier to progress is poor speech understanding in background noise, especially in
settings with many simultaneous talkers. The current CI simulation study evaluates the efficacy
of a ‘dual-carrier’ CI processing strategy as a means to present simultaneous speech signals to a
listener on two unique carrier rates. Results showed that (1) dual-carrier processing improves
intelligibility of two simultaneous speech signals compared to simulations of current CI
technology and (2) dual-carrier processing enables listeners to monitor and switch attention
between simultaneous speech signals at will.
Description
Poster Division: Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)
Keywords
cochlear implants, speech in noise, vocoder, dual-carrier